Deadline: June 30, 2025
We're proud to announce a new monthly playwriting contest in collaboration with Bamboo Ridge Press. Every month, Kumu Kahua's artistic director Harry Wong III will select a writing prompt on the first day of that month. We're looking for 5-page monologues or 10-page scenes based on that prompt; the due date for submissions are always the last day of the month. All entries must be written in traditional play format; instructions on this format can be found here (https://www.dramatistsguild.com/script-formats), courtesy of the Dramatists Guild.
There will be one winner each month. Scripts will be submitted to the judges anonymously. Winners will receive $100 and a subscription to Bamboo Ridge Press. Woo!
The prompt for June 2025 is:
A word salad prompt. Write a 10- to 12-page maximum scene — not a monologue — using Donald Trump’s response taken from a transcript of a Business Roundtable meeting in Doha, Qatar on May 15, 2025, recorded in Roll Call; 00:10:42-00:13:47. These lines are public record and can be found here, or below. The lines from this response are only certain lines you can use and they have to be used in the order they occur. Break the lines up into dialogue. You can also make up stage directions. Use as many characters you want/need to make sense of Trump’s response. The president’s response you have is verbatim and unedited. Remember, only use the lines provided in the order they occur:
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ROLL CALL (ROLLCALL.COM) REMARKS: DONALD TRUMP ATTENDS A BUSINESS ROUNDTABLE IN DOHA, QATAR - MAY 15, 2025
TAKEN FROM TRANSCRIPT OF THE MEETING IN ROLL CALL; 00:10:42-00:13:47
“…when you look at what's happening with Russia and Ukraine.
The drone is killing tremendous numbers of people. You hide behind a tree and the drone comes down and it circles you with fire. You don't have a chance. The tree comes down also, by the way. It's so intense. I mean, you see these trees being knocked down like they're being sawed down by a top of the line timberman, like, you know who, Sean Duffy.
Do you know that Sean Duffy, the head of the transportation department, who's working right now on the airports and getting a system because Biden didn't do a thing for four years and Pete Buttigieg was the head and he goes bicycling to work -- he takes a bicycle to work. Can you believe -- he's running the biggest air system in the world and he takes a bicycle to work.
And they say he's going to run for president. I don't see it. Who knows, right, but I don't see it. But when I look at what they've done, is so horrible what they have done and the work they did do, they wasted billions of dollars on trying to hook up air systems to copper and they tried to hook up copper to glass.
And the glass doesn't work with copper and they had 30,000 different contractors doing 30,000 jobs. And when they put it all together, they spent billions of dollars, it didn't even come close to working. And we're going to be giving out a brand-new system. It's very important. We'll have the best system and we think we know who that system is, but we have a lot of a lot of bidding.
But we want one check. We want a unified system. We don't want to have 5,000 contractors in all different places, some digging ditches and some not digging ditches because they want to go by satellite. Satellite seems to be the way to go. So we're going to be giving that out pretty soon, but what people don't know about, Sean, because I mentioned lumberjacks, that Sean, you probably didn't know this, I'm not talking about this Sea — No, this is a different, Sean Duffy, the head of transportation.”
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Best of luck!